And here is a pauper, missioned from the workhouse to break stones at the road-side. How he strikes and strikes at that unyielding bit of flint! Is it not the stony heart of the world’s injustice knocked at by poverty? What haggardness is in his face! What a blight hangs about him! There are more years in his looks than in his bones. Time has marked him with an iron pen. He wailed as a babe for bread his father was not allowed to earn. He can recollect every dinner—they were so few—of his childhood. He grew up, and want was with him even as his shadow. He has shivered with cold—fainted with hunger. His every day of life has been set about by goading wretchedness. Around him, too, were the stores of plenty. Food, raiment, and money mocked the man made half mad with destitution. Yet, with a valorous heart, a proud conquest of the shuddering spirit, he walked with honesty and starved. His long journey of life hath been through thorny places, and now he sits upon a pile of stones on the wayside, breaking them for workhouse bread. Could loftiest chivalry show greater heroism—nobler self-control, than this old man, this weary breaker of flints? Shall he not be of the Order of Poverty? Is not penury to him even as a robe of honour? His grey workhouse coat braver than purple and miniver? He shall be Knight of the Granite if you will. A workhouse gem, indeed—a wretched, highway jewel—yet, to the eye of truth, finer than many a ducal diamond. [Illustration: “He has dreamed his life upon a hillside—” ] This man is a weaver; this a potter. Here, too, is a razor-grinder; here an iron-worker. Labour is their lot; labour they yearn for, though to some of them labour comes with miserable disease and early death. Have we not here Knights of the Shuttle, Knights of Clay, and Knights of Vulcan, who prepare the carcase of the giant engine for its vital flood of steam? Are not these among the noblest of the sons of Poverty? Shall they not take high rank in its Order? We are at the mouth of a mine. There, many, many fathoms below us, works the naked, grimed, and sweating wretch, oppressed, brutalised, that he may dig us coal for our winter’s hearth; where we may gather round, and with filled bellies, well-clothed backs, and hearts all lapped in self-complacency, talk of the talked-of evils of the world, as though they were the fables of ill-natured men, and not the verities of bleeding life. That these men, doing the foulest offices of the world should still be of the world’s poorest, gives dignity to want—the glory of long-suffering to poverty. And so, indeed, in the mind of wisdom, is poverty ennobled. And for the Knights of the Golden Calf, how are they outnumbered! Let us, then, revive the Order of Poverty. Ponder, reader, on its antiquity. For was not Christ Himself Chancellor of the Order, and the Apostles Knights Companions? [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration]